Zita Johann - Guest Parking: Zita Johann

by Rick Atkins

Zita Johann graced the New York stages beginning in the summer of 1922. With her advanced intuitive professionalism in drama and the help of two great men of the theatre, Basil Sydney and Arthur Hopkins, Zita became a Broadway star in 1928. Hollywood came calling twice, and during a brief period in the early 1930s, Zita Johann became a Hollywood movie star. This would later be much to her chagrin. The Mummy (Universal Pictures, 1932), with Boris Karloff, and The Sin of Nora Moran (Majestic Pictures, 1933) with Paul Cavanaugh, are her two best-known motion pictures of eight. Guest Parking allotted Zita Johann eighty-nine years of life. Zita shared her life story with author Rick Atkins during their nineteen-year friendship. She told of her tumultuous family, with whom she immigrated at age six to America, her long love of the stage, her experiences in Hollywood, her failed marriages, and the reawakening that later changed her life. Zita's unpublished play, And Then It Was Morning, is within these covers, and the book concludes with an inspired Afterword written by actor Liesl Ehardt, a cousin to Zita Johann.